Boy-Żeleński wrote the columns that made up “Women’s Hell” between October and December 1929. As he pointed out, imprisonment for terminating a pregnancy threatened both the woman who had the abortion and the doctor who performed the procedure. Today, fortunately, in Poland, a woman is not threatened with imprisonment for terminating her pregnancy – although this is not a given once and for all, greetings to Kaja Godek and Ordo Iuris. However, assistance in terminating a pregnancy is still punishable. And Poland has one of the most draconian abortion laws in Europe.
Today, on a beautiful spring day in 2024, when the Sejm is once again debating whether a woman can or cannot terminate a pregnancy, I am reading “Women’s Hell”. And I am shocked at how current the arguments and diagnoses presented there are.
Below, I quote fragments of “Women’s Hell” in italics.
1. Fictitious law
“Penalties (for termination of pregnancy – ed.) threaten both the mother and those who help her terminate the pregnancy. At the same time, most criminologists state that this law has no effect and that the number of artificial miscarriages is increasing significantly.”
Sounds familiar? A handful of numbers. In 2021, 107 abortions were performed in Poland, and in 2021 – 161. An interesting result for a country of 38 million people. How many are there really? Good question, no one knows. Organizations helping women safely terminate pregnancies estimate that it may be up to 150,000. per year, Robert Biedroń once said as much as 200,000. If this isn’t an example of fictitious law, it couldn’t be more egregious.
2. One law for the rich and another for the poor
“Like all paragraphs based on social hypocrisy, this one only targets the poor. It is unethical because it hits random victims among tens of thousands of people who go unpunished; it is undemocratic because it provides the privilege of impunity to those who are already privileged.”
“A doctor will not terminate a pregnancy (apart from medical indications), neither in a hospital nor at a health insurance fund. Therefore, while the rich will find medical help in such a case, the poor are deprived of it.”
A wealthy woman will be fine. She will get on a plane or a car and go to a clinic in Germany, Slovakia, the Netherlands, or anywhere else where she can terminate her pregnancy safely and in decent conditions. However, a woman in a difficult economic situation who counts every penny does not have such opportunities. So it is the latter who will bear the full consequences of the ban. Both a hundred years ago and now.
3. A law that hurts
“The law is powerless; it cannot prevent anything; but with its existence it causes a lot of harm, it is not indifferent. Because, while stigmatizing abortion as a crime, it forbids it to doctors who respect the code, but it does not prevent all kinds of bunglers from practicing it, and Finally, mothers themselves don’t mind experimenting with “home remedies”.
A desperate girl who is trying to get rid of an unwanted pregnancy by swallowing a “pill from the Internet” that was bought for her by a boyfriend who is just as terrified as she is, does not really know what she is swallowing. Or by going for “menstruation induction” from an advertisement in the newspaper, she ventures into the unknown. Is this the standard of health care we want in our beautiful OECD country?
4. Baptize so that it has a name
“Here the ‘population policy’ of the clergy plays a significant role: it is better to baptize four children and then bury the same four children quickly than for none of them to be born.”
And here are my greetings to Jarosław Kaczyński. “We will strive to ensure that even cases of very difficult pregnancies, when the child is doomed to death and severely deformed, end in delivery, so that the child can be baptized, buried and have a name,” he said in a 2016 interview for PAP .
5. Law for people
“Make a poor girl a mother, deprive her of work because she expects motherhood, kick her with contempt, put on her the whole burden of the mistake and its consequences, and threaten her with years in prison if, maddened by despair, she wants it too hard for her to release the forces of burden – this is the philosophy of laws which, all too well known, were written by men!
“You also need to be a thinker, have a heart and a conscience, and create laws. Otherwise, life will follow laws and codes. They will be trampled at every step, and the victims will be both intelligent women and ordinary worker-mothers.”
Yes, dear rulers. This is for you.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
